Over the course of this busy day its become clear the Republican government shutdown over Obamacare is profoundly unpopular, plus they’re getting blamed for it, hard. The timing couldn’t have been worse, by the end of this day millions of people will have learned the dreaded Obamacare is simply a website with a bunch of boring healthcare insurance policies. On a hilarious side note, Teaparty Jeremiad’s have lowered their Obamacare threat level from “Worst Nazi death law ever that will destroy the country and end freedom” to “there are … err.. dangerous intermittent site glitches”.

Even time is against them now; the longer this draws out the more likely a debt deal will have to be included. So the House pulled another lame stalling tactic: [Read more…]

Almost like a modern Lourdes, the sick and desperate are finding salvation and speaking up about it today. But there’s no miracle involved, this virtual march for life is driven by medical science, delivered via the Internet, and made possible by Obamacare. Science and effective public policy can go a long, long ways together.

Below are a few of those stories. They speak for themselves, but it’s just stunning, downright evil I would argue, when a political party in America would feel such hatred for this down into their rotten core, that they happily shutdown the nation as a sort of collective punishment to We the People for electing someone they don’t like. [Read more…]

Click image above or this link for an excellent interactive bitmap showing state-by-state statusBelow is a linkfest of every state’s HIX and some info about that state’s progress. Some sites are crashing, others are up. If the state name is hyperlinked you can click it for specific info on that state’s progress in creating an exchange. For those states without an HIX, I’ve linked the specific Healthcare.gov page for that state. Healthcare.gov has also been staggering under the traffic demands. [Read more…]

Yosemite Valley is quiet, NOAA is down, NASA is furloughed and it reaches all the way to Mars, where Curiosity has been put in indefinite sleep mode, and WW II vets have had to bust down the barriers to enter a memorial, all thanks to the Republican shutdown. But the healthcare sites are open for business and BOOMING. We knew it would be big, but I’m told it’s huge. Here’s a few numbers I’ve seen bouncing around. The New York HIX, called the NYStateofHealth, has logged well over two million hits in the first few hours. Similar numbers are expected for large states like California which just opened their HIX, Covered California, a few mins ago.

Word is the main site, Healthcare.gov, has now recorded more than one million unique IP hits and that was an hour ago when it was lagging and serving up a DOS splash screen. To put that in perspective, it’s more people on that one site than have ever been on Medicare.gov all at once since the site opened.

This is obviously a giant failure of the free market …

They’ve been warned by those who came before them, but fervent belief in a miracle outweighed common sense as the Teaparty managed to talk itself into thinking a shutdown over Obamacare would have wide support and punish the WH. Why wouldn’t they believe that? They believe Obama is responsible for everything bad and a lot of other “bad” stuff they just made up, and they think everyone agrees with them. The latest poll shows that that belief is slated for painful destruction in the reality-based wood chipper: [Read more…]

 

Let the zombie apocalypse begin: October 1, 2014, and the creature is stirring to life! I was able to go to Healthcare-dot-gov, and even though the site is not technically at full function until 8 AM EDT and has been getting hammered since midnight, I was able to create screen names and passwords. I was even able to sign in briefly and begin the enrollment process on one state’s exchange. I set up several emails to check various domains, AOL, Yahoo, and Gmail. Sadly, no zombie government agents showed up at my front door, I have yet to receive a summons to serve on a liberal death panel and decide the fate of comatose grandma. No doubt it’s lost in the mail, that stupid gubmit can’t do anything right! But here’s some prelim info and results below. [Read more…]